Indigenous Knowledge and Development Monitor, 1993

'BEYOND FARMER FIRST': RESEARCH PROGRAMME AND WORKSHOP - John Thompson

Since the mid-1980s, the 'Farmer First' philosophy has gained widespread attention and support from agencies and institutions around the world, enough to begin challenging the conventional approaches to research and extension. This change in thinking has emphasized the need to 'listen and learn from the people' and to make local people active partners in the research and development process. Undoubtedly, these are steps in the right direction. However, there is also criticism: 'naive populism', some people say. The International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) in London has been examining the approach's strenghts and weaknesses in its research programme and a recent workshop.

Why 'Beyond Farmer First'?

The impact of the 'Farmer First' approach has already been felt through the work of many NGOs and growing numbers of universities, international and national agricultural research centres, and national agricultural extension programmes. While many hail the 'Farmer First' thinking as a step in the right direction, it is not without its detractors. These critics argue that such an approach represents a form of `naive populism' that fails to consider the sociocultural and political economic dimensions of knowledge creation, innovation, transmission and use within rural societies and scientific organisations. Moreover, 'supply-led populism' still assumes that development requires intervention or management by outsiders, even if it is more in line with farmers' needs than previous modernisation approaches to development. It is difficult to deny the connotation this thinking carries of a transfer of power from outside aimed at creating countervailing forces inside. It is not surprising, therefore, that, when applied, populist strategies encounter the same sorts of problems as other interventionist programmes. No matter how firm the commitment, the concept of powerful outsiders helping powerless insiders is always present.

The attempt to 'blend' or 'integrate' local knowledge into existing scientific procedures assumes that rural people's knowledge represents an easily definable 'body' or 'stock' of knowledge ready for extraction and incorporation. The critics point out, however, that rural people's knowledge, like scientific knowledge, is always fragmentary, partial and provisional in nature. It is never fully unified or integrated in terms of an underlying cultural logic or system of classification. Moreover, knowledge is embedded in and emerges out of a multidimensional universe in which diverse cultural, economic, environmental, and sociopolitical factors intersect and influence one another. The process takes place on the basis of existing conceptual frameworks and processes and is affected by various social contingencies, such as the capacities, experiences, interests, resources and patterns of social interaction characteristic of the particular group or groups of individuals. Finally, knowledge, whether 'indigenous' or 'scientific', is inclusive in the sense that it is the result of a great many decisions and selective assimilations of previous beliefs, ideas and images, but at the same time exclusive of other possible frames of conceptualisation and understanding. Hence, it is not an accumulation of 'facts' but involves ways of comprehending the world: knowledge is always in the making.

Although we in the Sustainable Agriculture Programme of the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED), London, have been promoters of the 'Farmer First' agenda since our founding in 1986, we felt it vital to explore and address these limitations and concerns. Hence, we conceived a programme for research support and institutional collaboration, entitled 'Beyond Farmer First: Rural People's Knowledge, Agricultural Research and Extension Practice', to expose the paradox of the prevailing populist conception of power and knowledge, and to challenge the simple notion that social processes follow straightforward and systemic patterns and can thus be manipulated with a transfer of power from the outside to the inside.

Collaborative research

In 1991, IIED asked researchers from 14 institutions in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe to prepare detailed case studies examining the interplay between formal and informal knowledge systems and to assess the implications for agricultural research and extension practice. The paper themes ranged from ethnoveterinary care in Eritrea and Eastern Sudan to potato production in the Andes to integrated pest management in East Java. The Sustainable Agriculture Programme collected and distributed a selection of journal articles, books, excerpts of theses and reports, and other relevant information, as well as an overview paper on the key themes, to the authors. This material served as a core literature around which the authors added their own material as their studies developed.

Each study began by viewing 'knowledge' as a social process and knowledge systems in terms of a multiplicity of actors and networks through which certain kinds of information are communicated and negotiated, and not as single, cohesive structures, stocks or stores. The guiding phrase was 'the analysis of difference', which suggests that knowledge is multi-layered, fragmentary and diffuse, not unitary and systematised. From this vantage point, knowledge emerges as a product of the interaction and dialogue between different actors and networks of actors, often with conflicting loyalties.

The challenge for the case study investigators was to assess how people in different agroecological and sociocultural contexts make sense of and deal with constraining and enabling processes related to research and extension; how they attempt to enrol one another in their various endeavours; and how they use relations of power in their struggles to gain access to and control social and political space.

The Workshop

With the empirical work well under way, preparations began for an international workshop to be held during the last week of October, 1992, at the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK, site of the original 'Farmer First' workshop (July 1987), at which the different case studies could be contrasted and compared. In addition, a small number of researchers and practitioners who have been involved in promoting, analyzing and/or criticising the populist approach were invited to contribute their thoughts on the theoretical, methodological and institutional aspects surrounding the debate through short discussion papers.

Our intention was that the meeting not only complement the achievements of the first 'Farmer First' workshop, but supersede it in at least four ways:

1. by investigating who knows - the analysis of differences in knowledge derivation, adaptation, and diffusion by gender, ethnicity, class, age, religion, etc.; 2. by examining access to and control of resources and processes, including relationships of power between outsiders and insiders; 3. by presenting and comparing experiences with new methods for enabling local people to conduct their own analyses and establish their own research and extension priorities; 4. by outlining what these new perspectives and methods mean for change in institutions.

Formal presentations were kept to a minimum and emphasis was placed on small group discussions. Three overview papers, the first on theoretical issues (Day 1), the second on methodological issues (Day 2), and the third on institutions and policy issues (Day 3), were presented by the IIED/IDS coordinators before group discussions began. To provoke critical debate, 'if...then' statements were formulated on key themes of the conference, for example: If scientific knowledges and rural people's knowledges are both normative, value-laden, socially constructed, and grounded in local cultures, then...; or: If rural people's livelihoods include agriculture as only one of many components (urban employment, trading and marketing, and so on), then...

Conclusions

The 'Beyond Farmer First' programme and workshop have been part of an attempt to move the indigenous knowledge debate beyond its current populist focus, and examine critical issues of power and need. By so doing, it was hoped that this effort would point towards more practicable strategies for developing effective and equitable partnerships between indigenous knowledge and formal knowledge systems through adaptive, people-centred, agricultural research and extension practice, moving from theory to practice.

Drawing conclusions from so diverse a range of discussions is very difficult, if not impossible. A common conclusion expressed in different ways on each day of the workshop was that if the knowledges and capacities of rural people and conventional agricultural scientists and extensionists are to have any chance of articulating productively, then attempting to force rural people's knowledges into a straight-jacket imposed by the framework of formal science is unlikely to work. Instead, productive engagement is only possible when commonground is found. These encounters may lead to conflict, although even conflict may itself be creative or cooperative, and lead to new ideas, innovations or changing social relations.

In some cases, farmers' experimentation may follow a positivist mode of inquiry, involving hypothesis testing through empirical exploration. In such cases, the marriage of RPK and science may be relatively uncomplicated. However, in many other situations, agricultural science must change its approach to investigation in order to learn from farmers' knowledges and not simply assume that farmers must learn 'good science' by being taught the ancient art of split-plot trials and, as one observer has termed it, the 'tyranny of averages and norms'.

Where frameworks of local understandings are conditoned by socio-cultural settings, where agricultural experimentation follows a 'performance' rather than a rationalist plan, and where power, politics and influence affect the expression and application of local knowledges, alternative research and extension methods and approaches must be adopted if real communication and understanding is to be realised. This, in turn, implies significant attitudinal and behavioural changes, methodological shifts, and associated institutional and organisational transformations in agricultural research and extension.

Follow-up

In addition to the more than 50 overview papers, case studies and discussion papers prepared prior to the workshop, the event yielded a good deal of valuable information from rapporteurs' reports of small group discussions, commentators' reflections on the deliberations and the plenary sessions. Following the workshop, those recordings were transcribed and are now being edited. The combination of the papers and the workshop proceedings will form the foundation for a book that will be published in early 1994 by Intermediate Technology Publications Ltd., the publisher of Farmer First. The Centre Technique de Coope'ration Agricole et Rurale (CTA) has provided a generous subsidy for the production of the book, and a grant from Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries (SAREC) will support its preparation. In addition to the book, the Sustainable Agriculture Programme of IIED will produce a number of individual case studies and discussion papers as part of a special series of Gatekeeper Papers, which will be distributed free of charge, beginning in early to mid-1993. These are now being edited and prepared for publication; they will be ready for distribution beginning mid-1993.

John Thompson is Research Associate, Sustainable Agriculture Programme, International Institute for Environment and Development.

For more information on the Beyond Farmer First programme, contact: Sustainable Agriculture Programme International Institute for Environment and Development 3 Endsleigh Street London WC1H ODD, UK Tel: +44-71-388-2117 Fax: +44-71-388-2826

The Beyond Farmer First programme and workshop were made possible by the generous support of the Swedish International Development Authority (SIDA), the Swedish Agency for Research Cooperation with Developing Countries (SAREC), the British Overseas Development Administration (ODA), regional offices of The Ford Foundation and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA).

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